Topic: Bitfury Containerized Plug and Play Datacenter (Read 7380 times)

2 million dollars investment :-)

Well I looked at facts and made the theory .

China has a unique thing in that many really big ass dams are going on line as I type.

And bitmaintech can be Johnny on the spot for the next five months filling that need.

Unless you buy into Philipma's interesting theory expounded here

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitmain-is-killing-the-business-1362106

i.e. a roadtrain of Bitmaintech knockoff versions of the Bitfury container, charging around China from one free short term electrical supply to another, as new hydro comes online and requires load testing.

Actually I think you are wrong. Exactly same density can be achieved with plain single loop water cooling, without the expensive two-phase fluid immersion cooling.

The target market is the buyer without enough engineering skills to design its own mining hardware based on mining chips individually mounted on small PCBs.

The actual strength of the two-phase immersion cooling is for example when you really have to use large PCBs, like e.g. CPU/GPU chips connected to large arrays of DRAM. With speed-of-light limitation you cannot design around that constraint and the 3D designs used in aircraft or missiles would be more expensive than the pricy immersion fluid.

Bitcoin mining has no such unusual engineering requirements. So their target market is somebody who really has no way of purchasing regular engineering skills but has large amounts of cash burning in their pockets. Only the usual suspects are left: money laundering for organized crime or some secret departments of small nation-state governments.

This first point is 100% true. Once you find the best location you can there will never be a need to move.

This second point is just as straight forward and obvious from a business perspective. Its is much more costly to use immersion cooling than it is to just have a bunch of high powered fans in a larger, spread out facility. Land is not that expensive that you need to keep your footprint low at the cost of efficiency. I could easily see bitfury paying as much per Ghs for the facility/fluids/ect as they did for the miners.

It kinda depends on what aspect of the "Miner in a Box" you focus on. In my opinion, the whole immersion cooling stuff is squarely aimed at density (i.e. TH per square foot). The rest of the container business has been done by others and was aimed at simplification of installation and setup. Both of those have additional costs over and above the actual mining hardware. We've even seen a "Mining Trailer" that looked like it could easily be move in a day if the connections were right. While interesting, there is precious little value in making a substantial mining "operation" mobile to any significant degree. Yes it make the initial install easier, at a cost, but after that.

I focused on the immersion cooling aspect of this, and it seems fairly costly compared to a more "spread out" facility with lots of air flow. Pumps, radiators, and 3M NOVEC (or Flourinert), aren't cheap at all. They also have a long term run cost compared to fans and a more hospitable natural environment (e.g. a cool/cold climate).

 Standard shipping containers are more like 9' (appx x 9' (appx) x 40' (there are also 20 foot long and 53 foot (appx) long standard sizes).

 With the added cooling stuff on top, the Bitfury container would be closer to 9x15x40 at a guesstimate.

 Dunno where you came up with 40x100 for it.


 There have been a few previous "container" concepts floated, but very few that ever saw actual hardware built much less sold.


 I suspect the container concept from BitFury is aimed more at "simplify setup and installation" than at "save real estate".

Yes, the concept is nothing original. I know a Chinese manufacturer built one years ago and has been lying in the factory gathering dust ever since because of poor ROI. Let me try to find some photos that I took from my hard drive.

It's kind of interesting to see what drives this kind of product. Obviously it's all about density in terms of hashrate per square foot (or meter if you prefer). I am wondering though, where is real estate for a mining enterprise expensive, but has low electricity costs? Sure you could decide to put mining farm in downtown Tokyo, but wouldn't the electricity cost also be large?

It seems to me that there has got to be a fairly limited market, and for a truly cost efficient mining enterprise, you need cheap electricity, modest to cheap real estate, and reliable Internet. So far it seems that this will be the mining "holy grail" for the future, and that you could go ahead and optimize one, but completely lose on the others (e.g. cheap real estate and electricity, but poor Internet).

Either way, I think it's unlikely that any of the forum members will be trying to purchase one of the containerized mining farms anytime soon. I would be interested though on what it costs, and the surrounding infrastructure items and costs (e.g. 480VAC? Chilled water? What?).

The proof of concept obviously did exist even in the days of ASICMINER. They had some pilot installation with 2 or 3 half-rack vats of Novec cooling then current ASICMINER boards and power supplies. The video used carefully staged angles (and possibly VFX) to make it look that there are whole rows of full racks in operation. The pilot installation was located in Singapore or some such are with extremely limited and valuable real estate.

The containers (steel cages) obviously do exist. The second stage water pump and water cooling radiator & fan combos are also standard industrial equipment.

I do share your doubt that they will ever close a sale or lease contract. With their sales tactics the whole thing stinks too much of snake oil. It will be hard (but not impossible) to find somebody stupid enough to plunk the money for the full installation. I was actually somewhat disappointed when I read that Bitfury acquired Allied Control.

I'm not sure they want to disclose anything really.  I view this as the bitfury lightbulb.   They put something out there to make some news, no doubt some sites showed it. 

The lightbulb they said they would sell.... and just never came.  I predict this container will not even make it as far as the lightbulb.  I think it will remain a rendering.  If they make one even as proof of concept I will be surprised.

I think you may be lowballing the cost and lead time for the required quantities of Novec fluid.

Before I knew about Novec as a cooling fluid I though that this was just another reagent used in medical industry. There I overheard people talking about borrowing a 50 gallons drum of some used Novec to keep their medical test processing line up. Novec isn't some neutral or noble fluid. This is some sort of super-solvent that can leach nearly anything out of nearly everything. Keeping it reasonably clean is a tightly controlled information, one that Allied Control/Bitfury folks will not disclose.

Anyway my take is that the Allied Control folks are their own biggest enemy. They sales tactics are such that if they were selling illicit drugs to junkies the Narcotics Anonymous would have had a banner year.

In the absence of real news, how about a repost from 2013 about ASICMINER DragonFire and ChainForker?

I thnk that Bitfury are very unlikely to sell these containers, on their webpage blurb they mention the phrase 'maintained by Bitfury' which to my mind suggest a leasing agreement. Look at it this way, if they rent oiut the equipment then they get the best of both worlds - they can get someone to essentially fund it, charge them monthly maintenance fees then take it back at the end of the lease period and upgrade it with new chips, also throwing in terms that if Btc rises in price then then get a cut of the extra profit (but not a cut in rental if it falls).

Imagine this scenario:

Btc = $400, Network hashrate is at 1500PH, block reward has halved to 12.5Btc.

1 PH earns approx US$ 11.7k per month after electricity cost of 3 US cents per kWh, for 16PH it's $187k

Network hashrate rises linearly by 100 PH per month, over a year the 16 PH container will earn a total
of roughly $1.56 million, again after electricity costs.

I estimate that Bitfury can build this containerised system for about $900 k, including 11kV input capability. Of that amount around $550k will be 160,000 chips on plug in modules, so the actual infrastructure costs about $350k. If they build the container with borrowed money at, say 8% then after a year then will have paid for the container and have around $590k in the bank.


Is it better to keep the container and mine with it themselves or charge a third party a rental fee?

From the investors perspective they might pay anything up to $1.35 million in the hope of making 15% on their money, where else could they enjoy short term potential profit at this rate? At $1.35M Bitfury makes a $450k profit on the deal less their 'maintenance' costs - if charged, but they will be using someone else's money to build the container in the first place and that might be a very inportant factor in their decision - more containers built means lower parts costs AND deters competitors. They also still have the container at the end of the years contract. The investors could sell their hashing power onto others and so increase their effective margins without using so much (if any) of their own money.

Naturally, all of this is highly speculative and depends on many factors but I though it was worth taking a stab at how things might shape up.

Any other theories / conjectures? All comments welcome

 

They are not near as impressive and are kinda dated as I think the idea of container just sounds better on paper then it turns out to be.    I don't know if either of those companies had sales.   

The second company had price of like 35k for just it being wired up, and cooling.  No miners were in that price which seems insane.   I think bitfury will stay in renderings as sales just are not there on these, unless they do it much cheaper then others did.

Some nice pictures in that thread, not quite as impressive looking as Bitfury, but at least they are real....


Rich

Took me a while to find but here is one: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10770794

And there is: http://www.cryptokube.com/

Those are only ones I have seen actually go from rendering to actual one. I think data centers win out over these things.

Good to know, but still just an, impressive, render, or has anyone actually seen one of these containerised Miners?


Rich

Allied Control is not "other people". Bitfury acquired Allied Control some time ago.

I had a scout round to see what I could find and there are a couple of similar Containers / Data centres from other people.



Impressive looking with 1.2MW, but just another render, so perhaps just a concept?

The only other Container I could find was an Icelandic Data Centre, but at least it's real. 




Rich

I believe it is just rendering with bitfury.  I don't think it exists or they would show it off.  And I'm guessing if they do have miners they are more worried about switching in regular data center.  I dont see to many buyers of this if any.

The one company that sold containers before for mining I believe had 1 or 2 they showed off.   I think it was SP gear in it.  I can't find a link.  It was also not near as impressive as this rendering on cooling.